A bad week for words

If you were in Hawaii last Saturday, you may have suffered 40 minutes of uncertainty when someone accidentally pressed a button warning that a ballistic missile was heading your way. I suppose it must have been horrible, but screw you! You were in Hawaii! Have you see the weather here?

The message people saw on their phones read as follows:

Clearly, this is a distressing message to read, but in my opinion not distressing enough.

I appreciate the all-caps, like an office worker complaining via email about the purloining of clearly labeled lunchroom snacks, but where are the exclamation marks? Or rather, where are the exclamation marks! If ever there was a call for exclamation marks, imminent destruction by a hostile foreign power is one.

People throw around exclamation marks like crazy. They’ve become virtually standard. You can no longer answer a text with a simple “Thanks.” It has to be “Thanks!” Otherwise, people are going to think you’re a selfish, ungrateful jerk-face. But more on Donald Trump later.

“Have a nice day!” “On sale now!” “Put some pants on!” All these are occasions when we happily apply one if not multiple exclamation marks. So clearly the emergency alert people should have capitalized on the drama with “THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!!”

And plain black Arial? No. This is no time for the blandest, least deadly of all the fonts. Cooper Black, Franklin Gothic Heavy, maybe even break out the Copperplate Gothic. “Comic Sans is the last font I want to see,” people would say, and in this case they might be right.

And it should be flashing like an early 2000s MySpace page. That’s how you get people’s attention just before they “take shelter” (as if that’s going to help.)

Incidentally, around here, I don’t think we have an emergency alert system. Instead, you just tell someone at the post office and in half an hour everyone knows.

But back to Hawaii (I wish!), it turned out not to be a real emergency, so in a way it was lucky this lacklustre, punctuation-starved alert had such little visual impact, otherwise there might have been real panic. Shortly after, a second alert was issued:

Again, lack of enthusiasm, poor punctuation. It should be “Repeat: False alarm.” Sloppy all-clears like this make me want to… EXPLODE! Like an intercontinental ballistic missile! And why can’t I go to Hawaii!!!

Also, I’m not sensing any real remorse in that second alert, no “whoops, our bad.” Surely it wouldn’t have hurt to add a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

No one can explain how that first text got out, but the same can’t be said for President Trump. He knew exactly what he was doing last week when he described certain countries using a word that I can’t write in this family blog. Instead, I’ll write “sith-hole,” which, let’s say, is a place where Star Wars bad guys hang out, though I know you’re saying the actual word in your head right now, and for that I’m sorry. I’m sorry your brain has a filthy mouth.

There are no good substitutes for the word Trump used, no effective euphemisms. (Crumb-bum countries? Anus nations?) Consequently, news media were forced to break protocol and use the profanity, over and over and over. Outwardly, the standards people probably struggled with this decision, but the journalists themselves were undoubtedly delighted, since it is well know that journalists are the least mature of all professionals. Except maybe clown-fart inspectors. And humour writers.

But more disturbing than this breach of decorum — and, honestly, at this point, what is there left to breach? — is the spelling. I keep seeing it written as one word. That can’t be right. There has to be a hyphen in there, or two words. Otherwise, there’s the risk of running the T and the H together, making it sound like “shy thole.” And who among us hasn’t had a shy thole at one time or another?

And, yes, I’ve checked: “sith-hole” (the real word, the one I made you think again, written as one word) is not acceptable in Scrabble. But after this week, it might soon be.

So what do we take away from all this? 1. Hawaii is too close to North Korea. 2. If I were in charge of emergency alerts, Armageddon would really “POP!” 3. Language and how we use it are changing all the time. 4. Donald Trump is quite the sith-head.